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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Technology Week - Podcasting

Once every month, I post a podcast to this blog with an expert who can discuss a topic that will provide other professionals with the opportunity to learn something valuable. The podcasts have been very successful and I believe it is an effective learning tool. For those who are interested in the technology I use to put this together, here are the tools I use:

- FreeConferencePro: This has been an excellent find for me as it not only provides free teleconference service, it allows me to record the discussions I have with my interviewees. The recordings are created in both WAV and MP3 format. It takes a few minutes for the site to produce the file but once I have it, I download it and start editing it in a free sound editor called Audacity.

-Audacity: This is a free, open-source audio editor and recorder. I can edit the main track, add additional segments into the track as needed, and have the ability to provide a description in the audio file so that those playing the WAV file can see the track information come up in Windows Media Player. If you just download the software as is, you can produce WAV files. If you are interested in producing an MP3, you will also have to download the LAME MP3 encoder.

Once I am finished editing the audio file, I then post it to my Amazon S3 storage account.

-Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): This is a very, very cheap way to store media files. I am currently storing one website* and 6 podcasts. With that being said, my monthly bills for the service have never been more than 7 cents! With my most recent podcast surpassing 130 plays within the past 2 weeks, I expect my next Amazon S3 bill to rise a bit but be no more than 10 cents.

*How can you store a website instead of hosting it? Check out this excellent post by Joe Moreno.

-Blogger: While there are several blogging solutions available, I prefer this tool as it is free and very easy to use.

So that pretty much sums up the technology I use for podcasting. Do you currently use any of these products for yourself or your organization? Have you done anything innovative you would like to share - go ahead and leave a comment.